Quotes about first (10000 quotes, page 94)

“In 5,000 years of recorded human history… neither in the east or in the west… has any society ever defined marriage as anything other than between men and women. Not one in 5000 years of recorded human history. That's an astounding fact and it isn't until the last 12 years or so that we have seen for the first time in recorded human history marriage defined as anything other than between men and between women.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Kasie
Hunt
Michele Bachmann burns up Iowa, decries gay marriage
Politico
2011-04-11
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/52946.html
2011-04-15
2010s

Women , Men , Marriage , History

“The anguish of the third dimension is given its first verbal manifestation in poetic history in King Lear.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 18

History

“One should make movies innocently — the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden…Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D. W. Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Quoted in The Orson Welles Story.

Way , Learning , Animals

“I think almost everyone, including me, thought the election of our first black president would lead to new efforts to improve the dismal economic condition of African-Americans. In fact, Obama has seldom touched on the issue of race, and when he has he has emphasized the conservative themes of responsibility and self-help. Even when Republicans have suppressed minority voting, in a grotesque campaign to fight nonexistent voter fraud, Obama has said and done nothing.”

Bruce Bartlett (1951) American historian

2010s, Obama is a Republican (2014)

Fraud , Thinking , Effort , Help

“Anybody can talk me round. If I were in a Trappist monastery, the first thing that would happen would be that some smooth performer would lure me into some frightful idiocy against my better judgment by means of the deaf-and-dumb language.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Inimitable Jeeves

The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)

“I suppose, in the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'we didn't know - no one told us.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

Preface (page XXIII)
The Great War for Civilization (2005)

History

“One product is always ultimately bought with another, even when paid for in the first instance with money.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book II, On Distribution, Chapter IV, 306

Money

“They understood in their heart that it was indispensable to be brave; that Odin would have no favor for them, but despise and thrust them out, if they were not brave. Consider too whether there is not something in this! It is an everlasting duty, valid in our day as in that, the duty of being brave. Valor is still value. The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Fear , Heart

“Youth is frank, eager, and prone to believe in the good; it looks round, and it sees flowers; it looks up and sees stars; evil appears impossible, because it does not seem to be in ourselves. It remains for after and weary years to teach us, that even the young and the innocent may be led into crime by the strong influence of temptation. Passion first, and interest afterwards, lures the feet of men into dark and crooked paths, which none in earlier and holier hours deemed they could tread. We may have been often deceived, but it is not until we ourselves begin to deceive that we dread deceit.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Men , Youth , Star , Flowers

“The antagonist to the Republican Party has been the Democrats, the party of collective subjugation and individual enslavement. Then physical, now economic. The first black members of the U. S. House and Senate were Republicans. The first civil rights legislation came from Republicans. Democrats gave us the KKK, Jim Crow, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and failed policies like the 'Great Society'. Republican President Eisenhower ordered troops to enforce school desegregation. Republican Senator Everett Dirksen enabled the 1964 civil rights legislation to pass, in opposition to Democrat Senators Robert Byrd, a KKK Grand Wizard, and Al Gore, Sr.”

Allen West (politician) (1961) American politician; retired United States Army officer

2010s, Voting Democratic for the next 200 years (2014)

School , Housing

“India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the law of her own nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose, the rejection of everything new that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens to have been first developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude would be intellectually absurd, physically impossible, and above all unspiritual; true spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and create.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

The Renaissance in India (1918)

Law , Way , Nature , Light

“I didnt at first because horror movies scared me too much, but I really do love the genre and its a playground where you can really be artistic and create ideas in the minds of the audience and portray the unreal. Its very cool experimentation ground for a filmmaker.”

Sam Raimi (1959) American film director, producer, writer and actor

Interview: Sam Raimi on ASH VS. EVIL DEAD, DARKMAN and THE LAST OF US https://www.comingsoon.net/horror/news/747524-interview-sam-raimi-ash-vs-evil-dead-darkman-last-us#/slide/1 (October 26, 2015)

Love , Idea

“The ideas set forth by organismic biologists during the first half of the twentieth century helped to give birth to a new way of thinking — "systems thinking" — in terms of connectedness, relationships, context. According to the systems view, the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. They arise from the interactions and relationships among the parts. These properties are destroyed when the system is dissected, either physically or theoretically, into isolated elements. Although we can discern individual parts in any system, these parts are not isolated, and the nature of the whole is always different from the mere sum of its parts. The systems view of life is illustrated beautifully and abundantly in the writings of Paul Weiss, who brought systems concepts to the life sciences from his earlier studies of engineering and spent his whole life exploring and advocating a full organismic conception of biology.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Source: The Web of Life (1996), p. 29.

Life , Way , Idea , Birth

“It is remarkable that whilst the Doctors of the Sorbonne were urging Francis the First absolutely to suppress printing even as late as 1533 and whilst this enlightened monarch had actually issued letters-patent January 3 1535 prohibiting under pain of death any person to print any book or books, and ordering all booksellers' shops to be closed under the same penalty, the Jews should have hailed with delight this invention as a Divine gift and sung its praises because it enabled them to multiply and circulate the word of God.”

Christian David Ginsburg (1831–1914) Polish-British Bible scholar

Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible, p. 779

Death , God , Pain , Books

“There are readers—and I am one of them—whose reading is rather like a series of intoxications. We fall in love with a book; it is our book, we feel, for life; we shall not need another. We cram-throat our friends with it in the cruellest fashion; make it a Gospel, which we preach in a spirit of propaganda and indignation, putting a woe on the world for a neglect of which last week we were equally guilty.
I am not at all sorry that I have never been cured of this form of youthful susceptibility; one may after all become the victim of more inadvisable forms of folly. My infatuations have at least one advantage; they may lead to satiety, but they do not often end in disillusion. I have, of course (who hasn’t?), my Bluebeard’s closet of dead loves, abandoned for ever; but for the most part I find that the objects of my former adoration are quite capable of awakening my old affection. My experiences of love at first sight, being followed by love at second or third or fourth sight, I enjoy the bliss of both the constant and the inconstant lover. Indeed, these returns to old books—as I have just now returned to Montaigne’s Essays—have often proved, in a life of desultory reading, to be among the pleasantest experiences of that pleasant scheme of existence.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

“Montaigne,” p. 1
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

Love , Life , Books , Youth

“The distance that the dead have gone
Does not at first appear;
Their coming back seems possible
For many an ardent year.

And then, that we have followed them
We more than half suspect,
So intimate have we become
With their dear retrospect.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

Time and Eternity, p. 229
Collected Poems (1993)

Appearance , Dead

“I too
Will go, remembering what I said to you,
When any land, the first to which we came
Seemed that we sought, and set your hearts aflame,
And all seemed won to you: but still I think,
Perchance years hence, the fount of life to drink,
Unless by some ill chance I first am slain.
But boundless risk must pay for boundless gain.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

"Prologue : The Wanderers"; the last line here may be related to far older expressions such as: "Naught venture, naught have" by Thomas Tusser.
The Earthly Paradise (1868-70)

Life , Drink , Thinking , Chance

“If you would have clear and irrefragable for a perpetual joy, a glory and a defense, the unwavering confidence, "I am Thy child," go to God's throne, and lie down at the foot of it, and let the first thought be, "My Father in heaven;" and that will brighten, that will establish, that will make omnipotent in your life, the witness of the Spirit that you are the child of God.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 17.

Life , God , Lie , Confidence

“Last week, Mr President, I seemed to hear a strange sound emanating from Blackpool. And I thought at first it was seagulls. [laughter] Then I remembered that Labour was holding its annual Conference there. And I realised it wasn't seagulls, it was chickens—[laughter and applause] chickens being counted before they were hatched—[laughter and applause] except for Labour's call to enter the ERM and cut interest rates. That was a case of counting chickens after they'd flown the coop. Then, I heard voices getting all worked up about someone they kept calling the “Prime Minister in Waiting”. [laughter] It occurs to me, Mr President, that he might have quite a wait. [applause] I can see him now, like the people queuing up for the Winter sales. All got up with his camp bed, hot thermos, woolly balaclava, CND badge… [laughter and applause] Waiting, waiting, waiting… And then when the doors open, in he rushes—only to find that, as always, there's “that woman” ahead of him again. [applause and laughter] I gather there may be an adjective between “that” and “woman” [laughter] only no-one will tell me what it is. [laughter and applause]”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (12 October 1990) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108217
Third term as Prime Minister

People , Laughter , Winter , Waiting

“I have been a vegetarian since I was fourteen for ethical reasons. I continued to eat eggs and dairy until I did some research on the dairy industry and discovered the horrific treatment of farm animals. … I went vegan about 3 ½ years ago [in late 2014]. It was a process that took time and patience. I wasn't perfect, in fact I struggled a lot during the first year. That said, once I educated myself on how and what to eat, it became much easier.”

Allie (wrestler) (1987) Canadian professional wrestler

"Allie, vegan wrestler" http://www.greatveganathletes.com/allie-vegan-wrestler, interview with GreatVeganAthletes.com (2018).

Education , Time , Animals , Perfection

“That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of Lord Woolton. He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were.”

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Welsh politician

Speech on 3 July 1948 at the Bellevue Hotel, on eve of the entry into force of the National Health Service.
1940s

Women , Men , Money , People

“There are photographs under the pistol, showing his mother genitals. These genitals make no perceptible impression on him, though it was through them that he first entered the world.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

248
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

World

“Creation's being is God's pleasure, creation's beauty God's glory; beauty reveals the shining of an uncreated light. … Creation is only a splendor that hangs upon that life of love and knowledge, and only by grace; it is first and foremost a surface, a shining fabric of glory, whose inmost truth is its aesthetic correspondence to the beauty of divine love. … It is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. Only in loving creation's beauty—only in seeing that creation truly is beauty—does one apprehend what creation is.”

David Bentley Hart (1965) American theologian

Source: The Beauty of the Infinite (2003), p. 252

Love , Life , God , Pleasure

“My mother saw herself as a victim. Once upon a time she had shaped her future and made decisions -- she had left Somalia for Aden, divorced her first husband and chosen my father--but at some point, it seemed, she lost hope. Many Somali women in her position would have worked, would have taken control of their lives, but my mother, having absorbed the Arab attitude that pious women should not work outside the home, felt that this would not be proper. It never occurred to her to go out and create a new life for herself, although she can't have been older than thirty-five or forty when my father left. Instead, she remained completely dependent. She nursed grievances; she was resentful; she was often violent; and she was always depressed.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali book Infidel

Source: Infidel (2007), Ch. 5

Life , Women , Hope , Home

“Indian reviewers don’t read books. They have two days to produce 800 words. They read the prologue and then skim a few pages, then they read all the other reviews. If the first two are negative, you can be sure they will all be negative. If the first two are good, the rest will be good. It’s that low-level, that pathetic. It takes a kind of confidence for a reviewer to have their own opinion about a book. And a lot of people here just don’t care about literary novels.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

Jeet Thayil: Confessions of an Indian Opium-Eater

People , Books , Confidence , Reading

“Once they notice you, Jason realized, they never completely close the file. You can never get back your anonymity. It is vital not to be noticed in the first place.”

Philip K. Dick book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Source: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), Chapter 6 (p. 75)

“As author in control of the plot I can choose and dictate the fall-out of events from any number of infinite possibilities -- which is a very volatile state of affairs, suggesting the ephemerality of fictional narrative. I can choose to have seven characters and kill six of them off in the first five minutes. I can have seventy characters and squash them under a fallen rock, make them copulate with beasts, sit them on the moon or turn their hair white. This casual condition of authorship is irresponsible.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Watching Water

“Regardless of the prophetic value of Dirac’s description [on interference] his was probably the first discussion… including a coherent beam of light. In other words, Dirac wrote the first chapter in laser optics.”

F. J. Duarte (1954) Chilean-American physicist

in Introduction to Lasers, [F. J. Duarte, Tunable Laser Optics, Elsevier Academic, 2003, 0-12-222696-8, 3]

Light

“Even the most, 'emotive' view of music has to 'be' emotive 'about something distinct', which necessarily involves having a 'theory' about it, for better or worse, in awareness or unawareness, and that a 'musical' something distinct can be cognitively understood as an "emotional experience" only insofar as it is first cognitively understood as a human-communicative manifestation, as an "instance of thought.”

Benjamin Boretz (1934) American composer

from Meta-Variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought Red Hook, N.Y. : Open Space, 1995.

Music , Communication

“Here is how [life] happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace -- whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation — but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I'll do it again… This has not been a conventional review. There is no need to name the characters, name the actors, assign adjectives to their acting. Look at who is in this cast. You know what I think of them. This film must not have seemed strange to them. It's what they do all day, especially waiting around for the director to make up his mind.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/synecdoche-new-york-2008 of Synecdoche, New York (5 November 2008)
Reviews, Four star reviews

Life , People , Education , Food

“First, there is really no sign at all of any significant reduction in unemployment without a major change in policy…Unemployment has probably levelled out but at a totally unacceptable figure. Secondly, contrary to what the Secretary of State said, the post-oil surplus prospect—not merely the post-oil prospect, because the oil will take a long time to go, but the surplus, the big balance of payments surplus, which is beginning to decline quite quickly—still looks devastating…our balance of payments is now overwhelmingly dependent on this highly temporary and massive oil surplus. Our manufacturing industry is shrunken and what remains is uncompetitive…We have a manufacturing trade deficit of approximately £11 billion, all of which has built up in the past three to four years. This is containable by oil and by nothing else. Invisibles can take care of about £4 billion or £5 billion but they cannot do the whole job. As soon as oil goes into a neutral position we are in deep trouble. Should it go into a negative position, the situation would be catastrophic…To sell off a chunk of capital assets and to use the proceeds for capital investment in the rest of the public sector might just be acceptable. However, that is not what is proposed, and what is proposed cannot be justified on any reputable theory of public finance; and when it is accompanied by a Minister using the oil—which might itself be regarded as a capital asset; certainly it is not renewable—almost entirely for current purposes, it amounts to improvident finance on a scale that makes the Prime Minister's old friend General Galtieri almost Gladstonian.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1985/nov/12/industry-and-employment in the House of Commons (12 November 1985).
1980s

Change , Time , Past , Dependency

“Night and day I've been most intensely thinking about my painting, and I have been more or less satisfied with everything I've done. I'm slacking a little now, not working as much, and no longer so satisfied. But all in all, I still have a loftier and happier perspective on my art than I did in Worpswede. But it does demand a very, very great deal of me – working and sleeping in the same room with my paintings is a delight... When I wake up in the middle of the night, I jump out of bed and look at my work. And in the morning it's the first thing I see..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter from Paris, 15 May 1906 to Otto Modersohn in Worpswede; as quoted in Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 204
1906 + 1907

Art , Thinking , Sleep , Painting

“My fortune in cricket was to play when the first-class game was free and fast-flowing and with a county as concerned to play attractive and sporting cricket as to win.”

Tony Pawson

Runs and Catches: an autobiography (1980), ISBN: 9780571115655.

Game , Sport

“Bare Attention first allows things to speak for themselves, without interruption by final verdicts pronounced too hastily. Bare Attention gives them a chance to finish their speaking, and one will thus get to learn that, in fact, they have much to say about themselves, which formerly was mostly ignored by rashness or was drowned in the inner and outer noise in which ordinary man normally lives. Because Bare Attention sees things without the narrowing and leveling effect of habitual judgments, it sees them ever anew, as it for the first time; therefore it will happen with progressive frequency that things will have something new and worthwhile to reveal. Patient pausing in such an attitude of Bare Attention will open wide horizons to one’s understanding, denied to the strained efforts of an impatient intellect. Owing to a rash or habitual limiting, labeling, misjudging, and mishandling of things, important sources of knowledge often remain closed.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 35

Understanding , Knowledge , Effort , Learning

“Well, today in New York, after months of build up and anticipation, Star Jones made history and became the first person ever to get married.”

Tina Fey (1970) American comedian, writer, producer and actress

http://snltranscripts.jt.org/04/04eupdate.phtml

History , Star , Personality

“To the true African journalist, his newspaper is a collective organizer, a collective instrument of mobilization and a collective educator—a weapon, first and foremost, to overthrow colonialism and imperialism and to assist total African independence and unity.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

At the Second Conference of African Journalists; Accra, November 11, 1963. http://nkrumahinfobank.org/article.php?id=441&c=51

Education

“Alfie was an organizer. He would telephone the other kids a week before that first practice session (which he euphemistically called spring training), and he would knock on their doors the morning of, and they would look out the windows and say, "Hey, it's snowing," and he would say, "It's not snowing all that hard. See you in a half-hour." So we would gather our tired, cold bodies together, throw on our baseball clothes—old shirts, old pants, sneakers, old baseball gloves—and grab a couple of bats and scuffed-up balls, and we would pile onto the subway and ride to Van Cortland Park. We would run to make sure we'd be first to claim a ball field. Of course we were first. Nobody else was that crazy. My brother would direct practice for a couple of hours, batting practice, catching fungoes, fielding, practicing our curves and drops on the sidelines, fingers aching from contact with batted or thrown baseballs. We threw ourselves across that hard bone of a field so we would be ready when the spring suns finally thawed the ground at our feet. If the still-awake dreams of hunting lions in Africa were the peak moments of my night life, those frozen ball fields of February were the highlights of my days.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

Recalling his late brother, from "Life with Alfie," https://books.google.com/books?id=PWEEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA233&dq=%22Alfie+was+an+organizer%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAGoVChMIiqWJ2oHaxwIVipANCh2Utw2g#v=onepage&q=%22Alfie%20was%20an%20organizer%22&f=false in Orange Coast Magazine (November 1990), pp. 233–234
Other Topics

Life , Dreams , Spring , Sun

“As Nozick acknowledges, a modern state should not feel morally constrained by property holdings which might have had a Lockean pedigree but in fact do not. In this regard it is interesting that one of the main uses of Lockean theory these days is in defending the property rights of indigenous people—where a literal claim is being made about who had first possession of a set of resources and about the need to rectify the injustices that accompanied their subsequent expropriation.”

Jeremy Waldron (1953) American lawyer

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – "Property and Ownership" http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/property/

People , Feeling

“I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

The Indian Serenade http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/the_indian_serenade.html (1819), st. 1

Dreams , Star , Sleep , Night

“A branch of physics that I was working in for many years has lately become much less active. Many problems have been solved and others are so difficult that nobody knows what to do about them. This means that I do much less physics today than 15 years ago. By contrast, fractal tools have plenty to do. There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable. The hammer I crafted is the first effective tool for all kinds of roughness and nobody will deny that there is at last some roughness everywhere.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

Problem

“My first essay at making a steam engine was when I was fifteen. I then made a real working; steam-engine, 1 3/4 diameter cylinder, and 8 in. stroke, which not only could act, but really did some useful work; for I made it grind the oil colours which my father required for his painting. Steam engine models, now so common, were exceedingly scarce in those days, and very difficult to be had; and as the demand for them arose, I found it both delightful and profitable to make them; as well as sectional models of steam engines, which I introduced for the purpose of exhibiting the movements of all the parts, both exterior and interior. With the results of the sale of such models I was enabled to pay the price of tickets of admission to the lectures on natural philosophy and chemistry delivered in the University of Edinburgh. About the same time (1826) I was so happy as to be employed by Professor Leslie in making models and portions of apparatus required by him for his lectures and philosophical investigations, and I had also the inestimable good fortune to secure his friendship. His admirably clear manner of communicating a knowledge of the fundamental principles of mechanical science rendered my intercourse with him of the utmost importance to myself. A hearty, cheerful, earnest desire to toil in his service, caused him to take pleasure in instructing me by occasional explanations of what might otherwise have remained obscure.”

James Nasmyth (1808–1890) Scottish mechanical engineer and inventor

James Nasmyth in: Industrial Biography: Iron-workers and Tool-makers https://books.google.nl/books?id=ZMJLAAAAMAAJ, Ticknor and Fields, 1864. p. 337

Friendship , Happiness , Pleasure , Communication

“The story of Rachel’s unique illness was no secret in Crawford, of course. The fact of it had spread through the college the first year of Rachel’s return and the entire town knew soon after. Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial—some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else’s misfortune out of their voices and gazes—but mostly the community had folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion (1989), Chapter 4 (p. 286)

People , Pleasure , Secret , Family

“"Democratic" State practice is nothing more or less than State practice. It does not differ from Marxist State practice, Fascist State practice, or any other. Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: you get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

"The Criminality of the State" in American Mercury (March 1939). A similar statement was later made by Jerry Ford

Exercises , Study

“The longer my production moves in a definite direction, the less gaily it progresses. But just now something new seems to be happening to the stream: it is broadening into a lake. I hope it will not lack a corresponding depth. I was the faithful image of a part of art history; I moved towards Impressionism and beyond it. I don't want to say that I grew out of it; I hope this is not so... In lucid moments, I now have a clear view of twelve years of the history of my inner self. First the cramped self, that self with the big blinkers, then the disappearance of the blinkers and the self, now gradually the re-emergence of a self without blinkers. It is good that one didn't know this in advance.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1911), Diary # 899; as cited by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee Part Four', : Klee as an Expressionist and Constructivist Painter http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev27.html
1911 - 1914

Faith , Hope , Art , History

“Unlike most, a ball player must confront two deaths. First, between the ages of thirty and forty he perishes as an athlete. Although he looks trim and feels vigorous and retains unusual coordination, the superlative reflexes, the major league reflexes, pass on. At a point when many of his classmates are newly confident and rising in other fields, he finds that he can no longer hit a very good fast ball or reach a grounder four strides to his right. At thirty-five he is is experiencing the truth of finality. As his major league career is ending, all things will end. However he sprang, he was always earthbound. Mortality embraces him. The golden age has passed in a moment. So will all things. So will all moments.”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Lines On The Transpontine Madness, p. xx

Death , Truth , Age , Feeling

“That Stirling as well as Milnes should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imagine that Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Imagination , Nature

“People first want to spend money on food -- that is common across the world. The second, in India, is education. In many parts of the world, it comes way down the list of priorities. So, there is a huge opportunity.”

Mukesh Ambani (1957) Indian business magnate

Mukesh Ambani on retail and SEZ plans

Money , People , World , Education

“I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

On his stated opposition to the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese at the end of World War II, as quoted in Newsweek (11 November 1963), p. 107
1960s

Hate , Country

“Windelband, the historian of philosophy, in his essay on the meaning of philosophy (Was ist Philosophie? in the first volume of his Präludien) tells us that "the history of the word 'philosophy' is the history of the cultural significance of science." He continues: "When scientific thought attains an independent existence as a desire for knowledge, it takes the name of philosophy; when subsequently knowledge as a whole divides into its various branches, philosophy is the general knowledge of the world that embraces all other knowledge. As soon as scientific thought stoops again to becoming a means to ethics or religious contemplation, philosophy is transformed into an art of life or into a formulation of religious beliefs. And when afterwards the scientific life regains its liberty, philosophy acquires once again its character as an independent knowledge of the world, and in so far as it abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval scholasticism upon which it endeavored to establish religious beliefs. But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith, between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this conflict?”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), Conclusion : Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy

Life , World , Faith , Religion

“The first step in the direction of a world rule of law is the recognition that peace no longer is an unobtainable ideal but a necessary condition of continued human existence. But to take even this step we must return to a calm and responsible frame of mind in which we can face the long patient tasks ahead.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

"Are Shelters the Answer?", in The New York Times Magazine (26 November 1961), p. 125
1960s

World , Peace , Law

“We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

On the Castalia Institute in Millbrook, New York; quoted in Storming Heaven : LSD and the American Dream (1998) by Jay Stevens, p. 208

Life , Age , Art , Time

“Lord knows I'm not a fool girl
I really shouldn't care
Lord knows I'm not a school girl
In the flurry of her first affair.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Mad About the Boy (1932)

School , Fools , Girl

“Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.”

Franz Kafka book The Zürau Aphorisms

91
The Zürau Aphorisms (1917 - 1918)

“Michael believed longer than the other boys, though they jeered at him; so he was with Wendy when Peter came for her at the end of the first year. She flew away with Peter in the frock she had woven from leaves and berries in the Neverland, and her one fear was that he might notice how short it had become; but he never noticed, he had so much to say about himself.
She had looked forward to thrilling talks with him about old times, but new adventures had crowded the old ones from his mind.”

J. M. Barrie book Peter Pan

Source: Peter and Wendy (1911), Ch. 17

Fear , Boy , Time

“She believed herself to be completely normal. Two very simple reasons lay behind her decision to die, and she was sure that, were she to leave a note explaining, many people would agree with her.
The first reason: everything in her life was the same and, once her youth was gone, it would be downhill all the way, with old age beginning to leave irreversible marks, the onset of illness, the departure of friends. She would gain nothing by continuing to live; indeed, the likelihood of suffering only increased. The second reason was more philosophical: Veronika read the newspapers, watched TV, and she was aware of what was going on in the world. Everything was wrong, and she had no way of putting things right — that gave her a sense of complete powerlessness.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Veronika Decides to Die (1998)

Life , People , Youth , Age

“Playboy: Then for now, aren't you asking home-computer buyers to invest $3000 in what is essentially an act of faith?
Jobs: In the future, it won't be an act of faith. The hard part of what we're up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, "What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?" he wouldn't have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. But remember that first the public telegraph was inaugurated, in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity. But it wouldn't have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots and dashes, to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The majority of people would never learn how to use it. So, fortunately, in the 1870s, Bell filed the patents for the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph, but people already knew how to use it. Also, the neatest thing about it was that besides allowing you to communicate with just words, it allowed you to sing.
Playboy: Meaning what?
Jobs: It allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. And we're in the same situation today. Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won't work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are "slash q-zs" and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel—one that reads like a mystery to most people. They're not going to learn slash q-z any more than they're going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about. It's the first "telephone" of our industry. And, besides that, the neatest thing about it, to me, is that the Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don't simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Steve Jobs, Playboy, Feb 1985, as quoted in “Steve Jobs Imagines 'Nationwide' Internet in 1985 Interview” https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-imagines-nationwide-internet-in-1985-intervi-1671246589, Matt Novak, 12/15/14 2:20pm Paleofuture, Gizmodo.
1980s

People , World , Faith , Way

“When my daughter wakes up on her first morning in God's City of Zion, the sun will rise over Sierra Benida and shine upon the saints: the sun of the All-Wisdom; the sun of the Beehive, the Sego-lily, and Seagull... My son will understand that Egill Skallagrímsson and the Norse kings live here in Spanish Fork, but that they now have the gleam of righteousness in their eyes and have become leaders in the Stake, Seventies, and High Priests.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Steinar
Paradísarheimt (Paradise Reclaimed) (1960)

Wisdom , God , Understanding , Sun

“When Acheson was first joined State as Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs, he writes the following in a section entitled "My Search for a Function"…"My official duties were summed up in the Department of State Bulletin by misleading platitudes…Both (Secretary) Hull and the President…knew me and, surely, had not asked me into the Department to perform the largely nonexistent duties defined in the Bulletin."”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), State Department Management, Leadership Perspectives

Search

“I read your letters with my sister, and they give us both abundance of delight. Especially they please us two, when you talk in a religious strain,—not but we are offended occasionally with a certain freedom of expression, a certain air of mysticism, more consonant to the conceits of pagan philosophy, than consistent with the humility of genuine piety. To instance now in your last letter—you say, “it is by the press [sic], that God hath given finite spirits both evil and good (I suppose you mean simply bad men and good men), a portion as it were of His Omnipresence!” Now, high as the human intellect comparatively will soar, and wide as its influence, malign or salutary, can extend, is there not, Coleridge, a distance between the Divine Mind and it, which makes such language blasphemy? Again, in your first fine consolatory epistle you say, “you are a temporary sharer in human misery, that you may be an eternal partaker of the Divine Nature.” What more than this do those men say, who are for exalting the man Christ Jesus into the second person of an unknown Trinity,—men, whom you or I scruple not to call idolaters? Man, full of imperfections, at best, and subject to wants which momentarily remind him of dependence; man, a weak and ignorant being, “servile” from his birth “to all the skiey influences,” with eyes sometimes open to discern the right path, but a head generally too dizzy to pursue it; man, in the pride of speculation, forgetting his nature, and hailing in himself the future God, must make the angels laugh. Be not angry with me, Coleridge; I wish not to cavil; I know I cannot instruct you; I only wish to remind you of that humility which best becometh the Christian character. God, in the New Testament (our best guide), is represented to us in the kind, condescending, amiable, familiar light of a parent: and in my poor mind ’tis best for us so to consider of Him, as our heavenly Father, and our best Friend, without indulging too bold conceptions of His nature. Let us learn to think humbly of ourselves, and rejoice in the appellation of “dear children,” “brethren,” and “co-heirs with Christ of the promises,” seeking to know no further… God love us all, and may He continue to be the father and the friend of the whole human race!”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Lamb's letter to Coleridge in Oct. 24th, 1796. As quoted in Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (1905). Letter 11.

Love , Men , God , Children

“I paint all day. First Becka Brotmann with her loose yellow hair and just a suggestion of dahlias in the background. Then I painted Anni Brotmann at the clay pit, where the sun nearly baked us. In the afternoon I painted Rieke Gefken holding red lilies. I think it is the best thing I've done so far – I'll show it to Mackensen [her teacher in Worpswede] tomorrow. I spent another hour with Vogeler, yesterday.... he showed us a sketchbook full of his ideas for etchings.... many really fine and original things.”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

in a letter to her mother, from Worpswede, c. 28 August 1897; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker, The Letters and Journals by Paula Modersohn-Becker, eds. Günter Busch, Liselotte von Reinken, Arthur S. Wensinger, Carole Clew Hoey - Northwestern University Press, 1998, p. 81
1897

Idea , Thinking , Teachers , Sun

“The famous Lord Hallifax (though so much talked of) was rather a pretender to taste, than really possessed of it.—When I had finished the two or three first books of my translation of the Iliad, that lord, "desired to have the pleasure of hearing them read at his house." Addison, Congreve, and Garth, were there at the reading.—In four or five places, Lord Hallifax stopped me very civilly; and with a speech, each time of much the same kind: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me.—Be so good as to mark the place, and consider it a little at your leisure.—I am sure you can give it a little turn."—I returned from Lord Hallifax's with Dr. Garth, in his chariot; and as we were going along, was saying to the doctor, that my lord had laid me under a good deal of difficulty, by such loose and general observations; that I had been thinking over the passages almost ever since, and could not guess at what it was that offended his lordship in either of them.—Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment; said, I had not been long enough acquainted with Lord Hallifax, to know his way yet: that I need not puzzle myself in looking those places over and over when I got home. "All you need do, (said he) is to leave them just as they are; call on Lord Hallifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages; and then read them to him as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event."—I followed his advice; waited on Lord Hallifax some time after: said, I hoped he would find his objections to those passages removed[; ] read them to him exactly as they were at first; and his lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out, "Ay now, Mr. Pope, they are perfectly right! nothing can be better."”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

As quoted in Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men (1820) by Joseph Spence [published from the original papers; with notes, and a life of the author, by Samuel Weller Singer]; "Spence's Anecdotes", Section IV. pp. 134–136.
Attributed

Pleasure , Books , Hope , Way

“Beware! By Allah the son of Abu Quhafah (Abu Bakr) dressed himself with it (the caliphate) and he certainly knew that my position in relation to it was the same as the position of the axis in relation to the hand-mill. The flood water flows down from me and the bird cannot fly upto me. I put a curtain against the caliphate and kept myself detached from it.
Then I began to think whether I should assault or endure calmly the blinding darkness of tribulations wherein the grown up are made feeble and the young grow old and the true believer acts under strain till he meets Allah (on his death). I found that endurance thereon was wiser. So I adopted patience although there was pricking in the eye and suffocation (of mortification) in the throat. I watched the plundering of my inheritance till the first one went his way but handed over the Caliphate to Ibn al-Khattab after himself.
(Then he quoted al-A`sha's verse):
My days are now passed on the camel's back (in difficulty) while there were days (of ease) when I enjoyed the company of Jabir's brother Hayyan.
It is strange that during his lifetime he wished to be released from the caliphate but he confirmed it for the other one after his death. No doubt these two shared its udders strictly among themselves. This one put the Caliphate in a tough enclosure where the utterance was haughty and the touch was rough. Mistakes were in plenty and so also the excuses therefore. One in contact with it was like the rider of an unruly camel. If he pulled up its rein the very nostril would be slit, but if he let it loose he would be thrown. Consequently, by Allah people got involved in recklessness, wickedness, unsteadiness and deviation.
Nevertheless, I remained patient despite length of period and stiffness of trial, till when he went his way (of death) he put the matter (of Caliphate) in a group and regarded me to be one of them. But good Heavens! what had I to do with this "consultation"? Where was any doubt about me with regard to the first of them that I was now considered akin to these ones? But I remained low when they were low and flew high when they flew high. One of them turned against me because of his hatred and the other got inclined the other way due to his in-law relationship and this thing and that thing, till the third man of these people stood up with heaving breasts between his dung and fodder. With him his children of his grand-father, (Umayyah) also stood up swallowing up Allah's wealth like a camel devouring the foliage of spring, till his rope broke down, his actions finished him and his gluttony brought him down prostrate.
At that moment, nothing took me by surprise, but the crowd of people rushing to me. It advanced towards me from every side like the mane of the hyena so much so that Hasan and Husayn were getting crushed and both the ends of my shoulder garment were torn. They collected around me like the herd of sheep and goats. When I took up the reins of government one party broke away and another turned disobedient while the rest began acting wrongfully as if they had not heard the word of Allah saying:
That abode in the hereafter, We assign it for those who intend not to exult themselves in the earth, nor (to make) mischief (therein); and the end is (best) for the pious ones. (Qur'an, 28:83)
Yes, by Allah, they had heard it and understood it but the world appeared glittering in their eyes and its embellishments seduced them. Behold, by Him who split the grain (to grow) and created living beings, if people had not come to me and supporters had not exhausted the argument and if there had been no pledge of Allah with the learned to the effect that they should not acquiesce in the gluttony of the oppressor and the hunger of the oppressed I would have cast the rope of Caliphate on its own shoulders, and would have given the last one the same treatment as to the first one. Then you would have seen that in my view this world of yours is no better than the sneezing of a goat.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Known as the Sermon of ash-Shiqshiqiyyah (roar of the camel), It is said that when Amir al-mu'minin reached here in his sermon a man of Iraq stood up and handed him over a writing. Amir al-mu'minin began looking at it, when Ibn `Abbas said, "O' Amir al-mu'minin, I wish you resumed your Sermon from where you broke it." Thereupon he replied, "O' Ibn `Abbas it was like the foam of a Camel which gushed out but subsided." Ibn `Abbas says that he never grieved over any utterance as he did over this one because Amir al-mu'minin could not finish it as he wished to.
Nahj al-Balagha

Death , Hunger , Children , People

“At MGM there was a first wave of top stars, and a second wave to replace them in case they got difficult. I was in the second line of defence, behind Myrna Loy.”

Rosalind Russell (1907–1976) actress from the United States

Halliwell's Who's Who in the Movies (2001 ed): Art. Rosalind Russell p. 383

Star

“The distinguishing quality of most primitive art is the intense vitality which it possesses, because it has been made by a people in close touch with life, who felt simply and strongly, and whose art was a means of expressing vitally important beliefs, hopes and fears. Negro sculpture is essentially religious and cannot be detached from the tribal gods, priests and ancient rituals. When civilization destroyed these things, it also destroyed their Art. These carvings have a serious and pathetic power – a bigness and monumental simplicity born of the racial patience in bearing life with all its terror and mystery....(But as always, it was the artist who was the first to see in them a new thing – a new plastic conception – an artistic worth – a value as art – their importance as art).”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

1925 - 1940
Source: Primitive African Sculpture, Foreword, Lefevre Galleries, London 1933, p. ?

Life , God , People , Fear

“The biggest thing I learned was, especially the way I operate and how I am as a person, if I'm going to do a creative endeavor, I need to have full, complete control. Top to bottom. And with my book and website, I always had that. With the website, definitely, with the book, basically, with the movie…I didn't in a lot of ways. Nils and I, we had a lot of control, more control probably than almost any first time movie makers do within a normal studio system. We were in the middle between independent and not, because someone else paid for everything, and they kind of let us do what we wanted, but then once the movie was done creatively, it went in a direction that I did not want it to go, and there was nothing I could really do about it. It's hard enough to swim in that movie current by yourself, but when you've got weights tied to you and someone pulling you in a different direction, it's almost impossible. You need to pick a direction and go with it. If you're going to be a big studio movie, go be that, and if you're going to go be a rogue independent film, go be that. We had different people with different levels of authority on the movie that pulled us in different directions, and it just doesn't work. Either be in control or let someone else do it, but don't…too many chefs. I'm going to be better next time. Failure instructs, failure improves. Failure shouldn't deter you, unless you're just bad at it.”

Tucker Max (1975) Internet personality; blogger; author

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC6zdVKoNr8 (March 2010).

People , Books , Way , Failure

“In 1932 many dark clouds still hung round the horizon. In 1933, although the outlook was distinctly brighter, there was no settled feeling that we were about to enjoy a spell of fine weather. To-day the atmosphere is distinctly brighter. The events of the last 12 months have shown gratifying evidence that the efforts of His Majesty's Government are bearing fruit…If you look to what I might call the telltale statistics, the unemployment figures and statistics of such things as retail trade, consumption of electricity, transport, iron and steel production and house building, in every case you see a definite revival of activity…If I might borrow an illustration from the titles of two well-known works of fiction, I would say that we have now finished the story of "Bleak House" and that we are sitting down this afternoon to enjoy the first chapter of "Great Expectations."”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Budget speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1934/apr/17/financial-statement in the House of Commons (17 April 1934)
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Feeling , Effort , Housing , Weather

“The civil war which was started by the Cadet-Kaledin counter-revolutionary revolt against the Soviet authorities, against the workers’ and peasants’ government, has finally brought the class struggle to a head and has destroyed every chance of setting in a formally democratic way the very acute problems with which history has confronted the peoples of Russia, and in the first place her working class and peasants.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 379–383.
Collected Works

War , People , Way , History

“There is a multilayering of global networks in the key strategic activities that structure and destructure the planet. When these multilayered networks overlap in some node, when there is a node that belongs to different networks, two major consequences follow. First, economies of synergy between these different networks take place in that node: between financial markets and media businesses; or between academic research and technology development and innovation; between politics and media.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

The Rise of the Network Society, 1996

Business

“I believe that painter's judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way; but it does seem to me to be basically what happens when modern painters judge any new manifestations of painting... An artist's 'art' is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. How dare they collect those ugly early Van Gogh's like trophies…”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1950s, The painter and the audience' (1954), pp. 109-110

Art , Way , Thinking , Painting

“and here I give it under my hand that I will most willingly begin upon a new canvas [after his first portrait of Lady Dartmouth was criticized and rejected]. But I only for the present beg your Lordship will give me leave to try an experiment upon that picture to prove the amazing effect of dress. I meant to treat it as a cast-off picture and dress it (contrary, I know, to Lady Dartmouth's taste) in the modern way; the worst consequence that can attend it will be her ladyship's being angry with me for a time. I am vastly out in my notion if the face does not immediately look like; but I must know if Lady Dartmouth powders or not in common. I only beg to know that and to have the [first] picture sent down [back] to me..”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote from Gainborough's letter to Lord Dartmouth, 13 April 1771; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 74
1770 - 1788

Way , Time

“In retrospect, Mooney’s mission looks incredibly naive. It is astonishing that he could have been so close to affairs in Germany and yet not have realised the true nature of the Nazi regime; but it seems this was so. His efforts, though made in good faith, were kept secret at first, but eventually news leaked out and in the summer of 1940 PM magazine in the USA ran a series of articles accusing Mooney of Nazi sympathies and linking his meeting with Hitler to his earlier receipt of the German Order of Merit for services to industry in 1938.”

Morgen Witzel (1960) Canadian historian, business theorist

Source: Fifty key figures in management, 2004, p. 196

Secret , Faith , Nature , Effort

“She leant upon her harp, and thousands looked
On her in love and wonder—thousands knelt
And worshipp'd in her presence—burning tears,
And words that died in utterance, and a pause
Of breathless, agitated eagerness,
First gave the full heart's homage: then came forth
A shout that rose to heaven; and the hills,
The distant valleys, all rang with the name
Of the Æolian Sappho—every heart
Found in itself some echo to her song.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Sappho from The London Literary Gazette (4th May 1822) Poetic Sketches. 2nd Series - Sketch the First
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Love , Tear , Distant , Heart

“The convict system in essence was a form of compulsory, assisted migration. It eased the problems created by Australia's distance from Britain. Without it relatively few people from the British Isles would have made the costly journey across the world in Australia's first half century.”

Geoffrey Blainey book The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History

The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia's History (1966)

People , World , Problem

“We got up at four in the morning, that first day in the east. On the evening before we had climbed off a freight train at the edge of town, and with the true instinct of Kentucky boys had found our way across town and to the race track and the stables at once. Then we knew we were all right.”

Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) writer

"I Want to Know Why"
The Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories (1921)

Way , Boy , Training

“All hail, Macpherson! hail to thee, Sire of Ossian! The Phantom was begotten by the suing embrace of all impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition—it travelled southward, where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin Consistence took its course through Europe, upon the breath of popular applause. […] Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In Nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson's work, it is exactly the reverse; every thing (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened,—yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things. […] Yet, much as those pretended treasures of antiquity have been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the literature of the Country. No succeeding writer appears to have taught from them a ray of inspiration; no author, in the least distinguished, has ventured formally to imitate them—except the boy, Chatterton, on their first appearance. […] This incapacity to amalgamate with the literature of the Island, is, in my estimation, a decisive proof that the book is essentially unnatural; nor should I require any other to demonstrate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

William Wordsworth, "Essay Supplementary to the Preface" http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?textsid=35963 in Poems by William Wordsworth, Vol. I (1815), pp. 363–365.
Criticism

Books , World , Travel , Mountain

“I think that my first poetic impulse is for music; second a definite conception with the ring of the universe…”

Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) American poet

A Poet in America (1935)

Music , Thinking , Universe

“"If you believe," he shouted to them, "clap your hands; don't let Tink die."
Many clapped.
Some didn't.
A few beasts hissed.
The clapping stopped suddenly; as if countless mothers had rushed to their nurseries to see what on earth was happening; but already Tink was saved. First her voice grew strong, then she popped out of bed, then she was flashing through the room more merry and impudent than ever. She never thought of thanking those who believed, but she would have like to get at the ones who had hissed.”

J. M. Barrie book Peter Pan

Source: Peter and Wendy (1911), Ch. 13

Strong

“Neither Dexter nor I knew the first thing about running a small business. We were entrepreneurs the way Abbott and Costello were watercolorists. And so naturally it came to pass that Pieces of Mind was a hands-down, thumbs-up, flat-out success.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 8 (p. 170)

Way , Business , Nature , Success

“The spider-men came first, and presented her Majesty with a table full of mathematical points, lines and figures of all sorts of squares, circles, triangles, and the like; which the Empress, notwithstanding that she had a very ready wit, and quick apprehension, could not understand; but the more she endeavoured to learn, the more was she confounded”

Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) English aristocrat, a prolific writer, and a scientist

Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666)

Men , Mathematics , Understanding , Learning

“I taught myself decimals, equations, the square, cube, and biquadrate roots. I got some knowledge of logarithms, and some of algebra. I readily got through a small schoolbook of geometry; and having an odd volume, the first, of Williamson's ' Euclid,' I attacked it vigorously and perseveringly. Williamson's is by no means the best book on the subject, yet I am still of opinion that it is the best book I could have had for the purpose of teaching myself.”

Francis Place (1771–1854) English social reformer

Source: The life of Francis Place, 1771-1854, 1898, p. 18

Books , Knowledge

“We need action not words. For the first time we are facing the prospect of seeing legislation introduced which denies the right of trade unionists to come to the assistance of other unionists and denies the right of trade unionists to seek the support of others in their disputes. There is only one response. Faced with this legislation we should say we will defy the law. It is the only action we can take and it is the only response this movement can give. If there is an attempt to use this legislation then you defy it not as an individual union but as a movement.”

Arthur Scargill (1938) British trade unionist

Speech to the Trades Union Congress at Brighton on the Employment Act 1982 (7 September 1982), quoted in Alan Wood, John Winder and Gordon Wellman, 'Overwhelming vote to defy 'anti-union laws' ', The Times (8 September 1982), p. 4.

Law , Support , Time

“Grant's famous motto, "Let us have peace", adorns the entrance to his tomb in New York City. Brands rightly emphasizes that this was a call not simply for national reconciliation but also for consolidation of what had been won in the war. Union and emancipation. By the time Grant died, the first was secure. It took a long time for the nation to try once again to fulfill the promise of the second.”

Eric Foner (1943) American historian

"The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace" https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-man-who-saved-the-union-ulysses-grant-in-war-and-peace-by-h-w-brands/2012/11/02/154ae6e0-fe79-11e1-8adc-499661afe377_story.html (2 November 2012), The New York Times
2010s

War , Peace , Time

“This is the fourth film from hot Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. Two of his previous three movies, Show Me Love and Lilya 4-Ever, made my year-end Top 10 lists. So it was with great anticipation that I settled into a seat on the first Friday night of the 2004 Toronto Film Festival to see A Hole in My Heart. 98 minutes later, I felt like I had been dragged through a vat of raw sewage laced with Sominex - Directed by Lukas Moodysson.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=935 of A Hole in My Heart (2004).
Zero star reviews

Love , Heart , Night

“The Egyptian philosophers ventured on the perilous task of seeking out some analogy to the mode of operation employed by the Author of Nature in the first creation of organized beings, and they compared it to that which governs the birth of new individuals by generation.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 12
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Birth , Nature

“The framers of our Constitution came up with two major contributions to the art of government. The first was the idea of an executive not dependent on the political support of the legislature. The second was the idea of the judiciary independent of the executive and legislative branches.”

William H. Rehnquist (1924–2005) Chief Justice of the United States

ibid.
Books, articles, and speeches

Art , Idea , Support , Dependency

“[W]hen he came out of the anaesthetic the first thing he said was, 'What a man Ernesto would be if he could only write.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

Luis Miguel Dominguin had undergone surgery after being wounded in a bullfight. From the context it is clear that his remark about Hemingway was a joke.
Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 10

“At a certain age children are greatly intrigued by the possibility of locating themselves on a map. It appears strange that one's familiar life should actually have all occurred in an area delineated by a set of quite impersonal (and hitherto unfamiliar) coordinates on the surface of the map. The child's exclamations of "I was there" and "I am here right now" betray the astonishment that the place of last summer's vacation, a place marked in memory by such sharply personal events as the ownership of one's first dog or the secret assembling of a collection of worms, should have specific latitudes and longitudes devised by strangers to one's dog, one's worms, and oneself. This locating of oneself in configurations conceived by strangers is one of the important aspects of what, perhaps euphemistically, is called "growing up". One participates in the real world of grown-ups by having an address. The child who only recently might have mailed a letter addressed "To my Granddaddy" now informs a fellow worm-collector of his exact address – street, town, state and all – and finds his tentative allegiance to the grown-up world view dramatically legitimated by the arrival of the letter.”

Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) Austrian-born American sociologist

Source: Invitation to Sociology (1963), p. 81

Life , Children , Secret , Age

“We do not stand for a ban on the publication of the Quran. We take this opportunity to state unambiguously that we regard banning of books, religious or otherwise, as counterproductive. In the case of the Quran, we believe and advocate that more and more non-Muslims should read it so that they know first hand the quality of its teachings.”

Sita Ram Goel book The Calcutta Quran Petition

The Calcutta Quran Petition (1986)

Books , Reading

“Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. … It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation--and their ideas from suppression--at the hand of an intolerant society. The right to remain anonymous may be abused when it shields fraudulent conduct. But political speech by its nature will sometimes have unpalatable consequences, and, in general, our society accords greater weight to the value of free speech than to the dangers of its misuse.”

John Paul Stevens (1920–2019) Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (Majority opinion, 514 U.S. 334 (1995)

Idea , Nature

“Let us take first an absurd example: always preferring goods that come on Thursdays to those that come on Wednesdays, solely because of a preference for that particular day of the week. As we shall see, this is not contrary to the principles of rational choice, but it is certainly contrary to reason. The simple preference for Thursdays is a reason, but reason also demands the reason for that reason. And obviously there is none.”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

“I've had two lives: the first one when I was born in Puerto Rico in 1935 [sic] and the second when I came to Pittsburgh to play baseball in 1955. I have been very lucky and I feel gifted to be able to play well.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

Addressing fans at Three Rivers Stadium on Roberto Clemente Day, as quoted in "Pirates, Puerto Rico Pay Clemente Honors" http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/12807951/ by Vito Stellino (UPI), in The El Paso Herald-Post (July 25, 1970)
Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1970</big>

Feeling

“You, Honor, you first veiled
The fountains of delight,
Denying those waves to the thirsting lovers.”

Torquato Tasso Aminta

Tu prima, Onor, velasti
La fonte dei diletti,
Negando l'onde a l'amorosa sete.
Act I, Choro, line 358.
Aminta (1573)

Lovers

“The only thing that stops God sending a second Flood is that the first one was useless.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

Characters and Anecdotes book, 1771

God , Funny

“Protocols
Number 20, paras. 26-32
The budgets of income and expenditure will be carried out side by side that they may not be obscured by distance one to another.
…The first irregularity, as we shall point out, consists in their beginning with drawing up a single budget which year after year grows owing to the following cause: this budget is dragged out to half the year, ten they demand a
Graves: Clearly, the “Protocols” author adapts the text of “Dialogues” so carelessly in his hasty attempt to Prove a Jewish conspiracy!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.83

Drawing

“You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal President successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2006-12-29
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2006/12/our_short_national_nightmare.html
Our Short National Nightmare
Slate
1091-2339
referencing a quote by Gerald Ford
2000s, 2006

Law , Exercises , Question , Thinking

“You get first crack at the chicken balls if you get there early.”

Kerry Jackson

Radio From Hell (January 10, 2007)

“Here's the pitch to Mookie Wilson. Winning run at second. Ground ball to first, it is a run…an error! An error by Buckner! The winning run scores! The Mets win it 6 to 5 with three in the 10th! The ball went right through the legs of Buckner and the Mets with 2 men out and nobody on have scored three times to bring about a seventh game, which will be played here tomorrow night. Folks, it was unbelievable. An error, right through the legs of Buckner. There were two outs, nobody on, a single by Carter, a single by Mitchell, a single by Ray Knight, a wild pitch, an error by Buckner. Three in the 9th for the Mets. They've won the game 6-5 and we shall play here … tomorrow night! Well, open up the history book, folks, we've got an entry for you.”

Jack Buck (1924–2002) American sportscaster

Calling the final moments of Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.
1980s

Men , Books , Error , History

“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.”

Lytton Strachey book Eminent Victorians

Preface.
Eminent Victorians (1918)

Age , Art , History , Perfection

“The First Welfare Theorem holds only if all consumers and firms are price takers. If some individuals or firms are price makers (they have the power to affect prices), then the allocation of resources will generally be inefficient.”

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 3, Tools of Normative Analysis, p. 44

“First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you.”

Tony Benn (1925–2014) British Labour Party politician

The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, Robert Andrews, Columbia University Press, 1993, ISBN 0231071949, 9780231071949. A similar quotation is almost invariably attributed to Gandhi, but more likely derives from a 1914 US trade union address:
"And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America." General Executive Board Report and Proceedings [of The] Biennial Convention, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 1914. Google Books http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=I-0UAAAAIAAJ&q=%22first+they+ignore+you%22+%22build+monuments%22&dq=%22first+they+ignore+you%22+%22build+monuments%22&lr=&as_brr=0&pgis=1
2000s

Madness

Quotes about first page 94

Quotes about first
page 94